Mixx Reaches The One-Year Mark

Today's the one-year anniversary of local Web start-up Mixx, a company trying to make a business out of delivering customized online news to its users.

The idea behind the McLean-based Mixx, as I wrote in a piece about the local start-up this past summer, is that users can vote on news topics and vote them up. While that's a similar approach used by popular "social news" sites like Digg, Mixx's differentiating point is in the extensive way it lets users customize the news feeds they want to see or subscribe to on their Mixx home pages.

Traffic is up at the site. When I wrote about Mixx in June, the site was getting about 500,000 visitors per month. A few months later and the site is now up to 4 million visitors for the most recent month. (Digg, by comparison, gets in the neighborhood of 26 million visitors per month.)

Mixx founder Chris McGill says he thinks the uptick is a result of some new community features the site has introduced, as well as positive word-of-mouth. "We have a very enthusiastic community that spreads the content and the service with vigor," he said.

But the Mixx business model is still one of those in-the-works things. The start-up's plan is to eventually bring in revenues from advertising, but the company isn't profitable yet.

McGill said he isn't too worried about that yet. "We're not a capital-intensive company," he said. "Our burn rate is very low."